Helping customers be successful with Adobe Flex and LiveCycle Mosaic

Archive for June, 2007

… that with Adobe AIR you can easily exchange data between the desktop and AIR applications? For example, you can drag cells of a spreadsheet and drop them onto a DataGrid or drag a chart to the desktop.

If you have Flex 3 Beta, check the help documentation for the flash.desktop package and read up on the ClipboardManager, the DragManager, and more.

This article is an update of my previous article about a music player I built using the Apollo Alpha 1 release. Now that Apollo has become AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and the beta is available on Adobe Labs, I thought I should update the Music Player for the new AIR release.

Click the above image to download and install the AIR Music Player. Note that your system may interpret the .air file as a .zip. If this happens, pick “Save As” instead of “Open”, rename the file to “MusicPlayer.air”. Once the file has downloaded, launch it and it will install a new version of the Music Player.

The first public beta release of Flex™ 3 is now available on Adobe labs. This major functional release adds rich new UI capabilities, enhanced developer productivity, desktop deployment and enterprise testing and performance profiling tools. The Flex 3 public beta also marks the first major deliverable for the open source Flex project, beginning the availability of nightly builds, a public bug base and roadmap.

Beta 1 is an early preview of the Flex 3 release. The goal of the release is to give the community an opportunity to provide feedback on the feature design and to help identify bugs and missing capabilities. Not all of the planned features have been implemented, and you should expect to find significant bugs, so be sure to save and back up your work often.

Some of the new major features include:

Built-in support for the new Adobe Integrated Runtime (Apollo)

code re-factoring

memory and performance profilers

SWF file size reduction using a persistent framework cache in Flash Player

The Adobe Integrated Runtime – AIR™ – code named Apollo – is now available on Adobe labs. Using AIR, developers can use their web skills and tools (Flex Builder) to builld desktop applications that fit seamlessly with web applications. AIR applications can contain an integrated HTML control for displaying web pages and interact with those pages using Flex controls and events. AIR applications also have the ability to use system resources, such as the local file system.

The Flex/Flash/Apollo Project

I’ve been at my latest project for a while, writing bits and pieces of it when I’ve gotten a chance. Since the Flash CS3 Flex Component kit was announced I’ve wanted to build something that used it. I had the idea of making an Apollo application to show that the kit wasn’t just for Flex. Then I had a better idea: write an application for both Apollo and Flex, using Flash CS3 Flex Component Kit as well as a Flex Library Project to tie everything together.

I made what is perhaps a simple or silly application, but it does show how to do a number of different things. I call it the Flickr Scrapbook. The idea is that you make a scrapbook for your friends and family using photographs from Flickr – ideally your own photos, but anything public can be displayed. Each page can hold multiple photographs with captions and notes can be added as well. The pages and text can be colored, the photographs rotated and resized, and the whole thing can be displayed on a web page using Ely’s FlexBook control.